Sweep

Mark and Sweep algorithms use conceptually the simplest approach to garbage by just ignoring such objects. What this means is that after the marking phase has completed all space occupied by unvisited objects is considered free and can thus be reused to allocate new objects.

The approach requires using the so called free-list recording of every free region and its size. The management of the free-lists adds overhead to object allocation. Built into this approach is another weakness – there may exist plenty of free regions but if no single region is large enough to accommodate the allocation, the allocation is still going to fail (with an OutOfMemoryError in Java).